Why the next government needs to renationalise the railways - Yorkshire Post Letters

I do hope that Labour will enact legislation to renationalise the railways, as they have promised to do, should they come to power. Privatisation has failed and no wonder.

The rail network is a unitary entity and should be under a single structure avoiding wasteful duplication and the huge problems of having different operating systems work together across the network. Already it has come apart at the seams with Scotrail, Northern, South Eastern, Transpennine, Caledonian Sleeper and that most iconic East Coast Main Line - LNER - returned to state control.

The ultra right have always demonised British Rail and British Railways, which operated a national service on a budget that was a fraction of that during privatisation, a policy implemented not by Thatcher but by Major, not the brightest of our Prime Ministers.

Their main argument seemed to be the quality of the BR sandwich. When the popular Conservative MP Robert Adley - sadly no longer with us - stood up in the House of Commons and waved aloft a BR Timetable which he described accurately as "a wonderful book" and branded Major's plans "a poll tax on wheels" he was speaking the truth, and history has vindicated what he said.

Furthermore during British railways ownership of the network, we made our own trains lock stock and barrel - from the iconic Class 37 locomotives to the Intercity 125s - and didn't need Italian or Japanese designs.

And while the nationalised railways acted as centripetal force pulling the Union together, privatisation acts as a centrifugal force pulling it apart. You could buy a ticket at Wick for Penzance and you were travelling on a British train, not a privately owned one.

The one problem Labour will have to face is the behaviour of the rail unions and their disruptive tendencies at the drop of a hat. It's high time their members took back control.